Dangal will be the best film this year, says Sultan director

1. In the recent past, both Salman Khan and Aamir Khan have clarified how their upcoming movies on wrestling, titled Sultan and Dangal respectively, are very different from each other. But, in a recent interview, Sultan director Ali Abbas Zafar revealed how the two films bear a striking resemblance to each other.

2. While speaking to DNA, Zafar said, “It’s bizarre when I wrote this script, I had no idea that there was any other film that was ever going to get made on wrestling. I wrote this film in 2012, it’s almost four years since. And I can tell you now that the first draft of Sultan was called Dangal. The first 10 pages, which I mailed to Adi, was titled Dangal.”

3. Zafar added that ‘Sultan’ was a more apt title as the lead character was called Sultan, but the title was with Ramesh Taurani. Fortunately, the director parted ways with the title after Salman asked him for it.

4. “Dangal means a wrestling competition. When I travelled in Haryana for research in 2012, I would ask people about the matches and they would say, ‘Aaj dangal chaupal pe hai, aaj dangal nadi ke paas hai.’ I just thought ek jo charm tha uss title ka, bahut honest charm tha”, he added, explaining why he had named his film Dangal earlier.

5. When the reporter asked him what he thought about Dangal, Ali remarked, “I personally think it will be the best film this year”. Needless to say, the followup question to that was whether he thought it would be better than his own film, to which the director candidly replied, “Yes, I think, 100 per cent”.